Using a brain functional reaction method to measure personality stability in fMRI

The objective of this research is to assess the relationship between brain functional responses to emotional stimuli and the mental stabilities of people using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We evaluated personality features and physical symptoms of the subjects using psychological tests and categorized the subjects into two groups: the mentally stable group and the unstable group. Moreover, we investigated the personality traits of the subjects in the two groups and measured brain functional reaction under relax, pleasant, unpleasant human relationship, generally unpleasant stimuli using fMRI. The psychological results showed that personality traits were crucial factors for determining whether people can handle human relationships and affect how people keep a stable mental status. The results in the fMRI showed that the amygdala reacted to the pleasant and unpleasant human relationship stimuli in mentally stable people, while the amygdala did not react as much to these stimuli in mentally unstable people. These events suggest that mentally unstable people might have personality traits that can cause problems in human relationships. Moreover, insufficient processes in the amygdala regarding relationships could be the critical cause of psychosomatic symptoms in mentally unstable people.